released 3/1/2009

Pastor Eugene Peterson, author of Tell It Slant: A Conversation on the Language of Jesus in His Stories and Prayers (Eerdmans, 2008), talks about the kinds of language Jesus used when talking to people. He points out that Jesus rarely gave sermons in the gospels, but spent most of his time speaking normally and conversationally, and the Spirit infused this normal speech. He observes that many Christians generally do not understand their everyday language to be a participation in spirituality; for them, spiritual language is a contrived, churchy kind of language. For Jesus, Peterson reflects, there was no such division or distinction: his normal, everyday speech was always seasoned by the Spirit without artificiality. Moreover, Jesus’s language was often ambiguous, radiating meaning on different levels and encouraging listeners to pursue and participate in multi-dimensional, personal truth, rather than one-dimensional, impersonal data. In this way, Jesus’s language conformed to the nature of truth as personal and complex as reality itself.

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